At the funeral, Tony Behun?s father looked into the casket and barely recognized his own son.
The 11-year-old ? his body hollow and dark, his skin taut and his flesh bloated ? looked as if he had died from severe malnutrition.
“His body was so swollen. If I didn?t know it was him, I wouldn?t have recognized him,” Joe Behun said.
Just a week earlier, Tony had been a seemingly healthy boy, who rode his dirt bike through the woods behind his home. Doctors blamed a blood infection, staphylococcus aureus, for his death but they had no idea how he contracted it.
And neither did the boy?s parents. But in the spring of 2000 ? more than five years after Tony?s death ? a scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency linked the boy?s death to sewage sludge along the strip coal mines where Tony often rode his dirt bike in Osceola Mills, Pa., three hours north of Baltimore.
Now Tony?s father, sitting at a kitchen table, his head resting on his fist, says he has no doubt sewage sludge killed his son.
Others share the father?s fears about sludge ?the solid result after wastewater treatment plants use lime and heat to treat what?s flushed down toilets and washed down sinks.
An ever-growing number of experts identify sludge as the cause of a long list of serious illnesses and disabilities. And Congress has launched an investigation into links between sludge and illnesses.
Magnifying these concerns are soil samples from sludge in Augusta, Ga., that revealed levels of heavy metals that are hundreds of times higher than what the federal government deems toxic.
This discovery represents what many critics of the sludge industry see as solid evidence that spreading sludge ? a practice that fertilizes farmland while recycling human waste ? spreads disease and even death.
Tony Behun sloshed on his dirt bike through the fields and old surface strip mines behind his parents? home for the last time on Oct. 12, 1994. In a few days, he fell sick with flu-like symptoms and had to stay home from school. A few days later his health improved slightly, but then a blackened boil sprouted on his forearm, and he began vomiting blood.
Seven days after his bike ride, Tony?s parents rushed him to Clearfield Hospital just outside Osceola Mills, a tiny mining town.
“You could tell by the way they were examining him that something was really wrong, just by the way they were running around,” Joe Behun said.
After antibiotics failed to improve Tony?s health, paramedics escorted him by helicopter to Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. Within a day, Tony was dead.
His death stunned his parents, and Joe, a welder at the strip mines, lost hope. Tony?s mother, Brenda Robinson, no longer speaks about Tony?s death.
Years later, Behun and Robinson contacted David Lewis, at the time a top Environmental Protection Agency microbiologist. Lewis studied Tony?s hospital records and told Tony?s parents that the staphylococcus aureus bacteria that killed Tony probably came from sewage sludge that splattered into small cuts. For years, Behun and Robinson had fought against the use of sludge, trying to drive it from their town.
But they did not sue, Behun said, because by the time they heard the theory linking sludge to Tony?s death, the statute of limitations had run out. Joseph Cocalis, a senior industrial hygienist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, joined them in their fight against sludge, calling Class B sludge “biologically active” when dumped, allowing pathogens to survive longer than a month after it is spread. Cocalis helped force the EPA to establish guidelines for workers to protect themselves with gloves and masks.
“It has been very difficult to put together events that happened almost six years ago, but we want to help any way we can,” the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection wrote in a May 2000 news release.
The report said it found no evidence proving that sewage sludge was related to Tony?s or anyone else?s illnesses.
